Posted
by
timothy
on Monday September 24, 2012 @07:08AM
from the rim-edge-brink-what's-the-difference? dept.

Meshach writes "There is an article in the Globe and Mail that says that the user base for Blackberry has stopped growing for the first time in the company's history, and speculates that this is the beginning of the end of RIM. The main problem seems to be that RIM's new Blackberry models like the Bold and Torch are selling poorly, and their production costs are much higher than other products manufactured in China. A recent research report says that after BB10 the company will need to sell or drastically change its business model."

Wasn't there a story not so long back about how India is one of the few markets RIM is still thriving? In India, while people pick up quickly Western technology trends, they are not so fast in leaving it. Right now, Blackberries are one of the leading phones there, and that market's not going away. So if RIM disappears elsewhere, they may end up becoming a purely Indian mobile company, similar to Karbonn or Micromaxx.

That sounds completely reasonable and obvious. The problem with RIM isn't their product, it's their entire business model being outdated.

But RIM comes from a (short) history of dominating the smart phone business. I wonder if they can be rational enough to opt for a smaller marketshare of standard commodity smartphones instead of trying to regain that past glory. Perhaps RIM would be best served by simply selling their apps on all phones and get out of hardware alltogether. My guess is they'll keep trying t

RIM abandons all their old customers by passing the buck to the telcos, so I don't expect them to support my phone anwyay. I'm not sure why you think the 9930 won't be abandoned too.

I had to upgrade my 9700 with a leak from Bittorrent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_OS [wikipedia.org] "While RIM develops and releases updated versions of its operating system to support each device, it is up to the individual carriers to decide if and when a version is released to its users."

I don't care if they abandon the 9930. They've already told everyone that they will not be updating currently software.

Also, BB users know that they can download and install updated OS versions anytime they want regardless of carrier. You can usually get the software straight from BB's website. The phones are not locked and do not need to be rooted. Just check BB's forum, BlackBerryforums.com or CrackBerry.com for links to the software.

Even when the US becomes saturated, there are still international markets.

and finally, even though you are right: stagnation does not necessarily mean the end.. stagnation often does mean exactly that.

The problem is, when a company does not grow, it is essentially sitting in limbo until one of it's competitors kills it... either by finding the next big product; or by growing large enough to enable economies of scale that the ungrowing company cannot

No, I just believe that eventually those that stop growing, adapting and changing will eventually be left behind. It is in a way of never-ending, unlimited growth. Those that replace the stagnate company continue to grow until they themselves are left behind.

Apple is a classic example of a company that turned that around, dramatically. They were almost left behind, being given money by Microsoft just so Microsoft could claim that they are not a monopoly.

Atari computers, back in the early 1980s, showed us the problem of rolling your own hardware, operating system, and software.

They didn't. Atari 8-bit computers used CPUs and interface chips from MOS Technologies (which was actually owned by their competitor Commodore), though they did have some ICs like the POKEY sound chip custom-fabbed. The BASIC interpreter was licensed from Microsoft, just like on Apple and Commodore computers, though all of these companies made their own customizations.

Well I for one recently bought my very first Blackberry device (a 64-Gb Playbook, when the prices fell) for a very simple and clear reason: I want to stay out of Apple/Google duopoly.I have been waiting for a linux tablet for a couple of years; now I feared to really turn too old before they come (I swear, I'll buy one anyhow).While I am a bit pissed off by the ultraserious security and obviously definitive user-won't-ever-be-root feature, I find it has some positive side effects (you can lose the machine:

RIM is doing a terrible job of marketing the bold and torch, which are both really good phones. They don't have them particularly widely available - and perhaps even worse, well advertised - in the US. Ask an average US consumer if they've heard of an iPhone, they'll answer yes. Heard of an android smart phone, they'll answer yes as well. Heard of a blackberry torch, they'll likely say no.

If they want to expand their user base, they should try selling phones directly to users. It works well for Apple, there is no reason why it couldn't work well for RIM as well. They don't even need to open their own stores, they could sell them through best buy, target, walmart, radio shack, etc. Sell unlocked phones with manufacturer warranties, there is a market for that if they can hit a reasonable price point and free consumers from having to sign 2-year contracts to buy a new phone.

You can't run a company when every year someone successfully sues you for hundreds of millions of dollars over and over and over. I'm kind of hoping Apple does that no only to Samsung but to everyone everywhere and the whole cell phone market including all the carriers go under and we go back 30 or 40 years in terms of technology.

Really guys-RIM is not supporting the current users.
OSX with Desktop Manager. Updated to 2.4. Suddenly, the machine hangs, won't synch, needs forced restarts. The Desktop MisManager is the only bit of software that has ever hung my Mac, running 10.6.
Oh, and the Bluetooth in the Bold 9930 kept dropping out in the car. Are we pissed yet ?
Go to Verizon. They replace the Bold, even though I am out of warranty. New Bold still won't synch calendar or contacts. Useless.
Search forums. All have this

This is the begininng of the end for RIM? Yeah, that might've been poignant what, 4? 5? Years ago. They were like a dinosaur standing on a big block of wood...on top of a tar pit. It was just a matter of time without a miracle, and from the looks of it, they haven't even been praying.

I don't know if it's fair to say BB is done but I'm sure seeing a lot fewer of them these days. At a place I used to work at I got issued a BB and I've got to say that I really liked it. The battery would last forever it seemed. The phone calls came in loud and clear. It was great for texting and email. It was secure. I really liked the physical keyboard. But they were slow to adopt the touch screen interface and now seem dated compared to the iPhone and Android phones.

Since when did the fact that a company's user base stopped growing mean it was the beginning of the end for them?

In any normal (non-tech) business, as long as you are making decent profits your company is successful. You don't suddenly panic and close down if one year your sales figures don't increase. I've worked for engineering firms that have been going for fifty or more years; they may be smaller than when they were at their peak and outsource a lot of manufacturing to China, but they're still ha

All RIM needs to do is release the BB10 devices already. I'll buy one. I know many people who'll buy one. But there isn't one to buy, and the fact that it's "coming" is the main reason why existing (read - obsolete) models aren't being purchased. Why would I spend $500 on the 9900, if I know there will be a new one in under 6 months? If I wanted to spend $500 on a new phone every 6 months, I would switch to iPhones long time ago.

Don't forget that Android devices are ridiculously easy to lock down and set up with full encryption. There are actually companies out there whose entire business is doing just that for the corporate use scenario.

Its so stupidly easy to integrate Android with all of their existing email and even internal messaging apps(most of which are written in Java and trivially ported to native) that it beggars belief that they would consider much of anything else.

iPhone doesn't allow the kind of direct control that Corporate security demands, and WP7 has such a low penetration that no one is asking for it anyways. Android, even though there could definitely be better solutions, is currently the only real choice for corporate america. The worker drones get something that does everything an iPhone does(in some cases does it better, in some cases worse, but the important things are roughly the same, except for the GPS nav on android is much better) and they get their security.

I have a Playbook and the app store is pretty desperate. It's not hugely difficult to port apps to the Playbook - it has an Android runtime, QT, Java, C, HTML APIs etc but not many devs bother and those that do stick a premium on to cover their efforts.

It's actually a very robust device and barring some annoyances (some of which are very annoying) the OS is attractive, intuitive and the hardware is great. But it's not Android and lack of apps kills it.

I personally think RIM's future should be on Android. Dump QNX and Playbook OS. Produce a Playbook / BB 10 OS runtime for Android and then move house over to it. Make money by selling security hardened Android devices and value added apps that sit on top.

And they should offer phones with hardware keyboards. I bet there is a market for it. Keep offering services like ping - kids here love it. All kids in high school here (Netherlands) have blackberries. Once they have money or go to university, they buy an iphone or android phone. BB should find a way to keep them instead.

Android simply isnt designed for hardware keyboard use the way Blackberries were. RIM could try to do something with android, and it would still be a touch device first. It would also lose all of the benefits of BES that make RIM different and desirable.

Android simply isnt designed for hardware keyboard use the way Blackberries were.

It isn't? My old HTC Dream had excellent hard keyboard support, as does my current Samsung Captivate Glide. Now, it is quite hard to find a decent hard keyboarded Android phone (I had to import mine from the US), but the software itself supports it fine.

Android has keyboard and mouse events, it's just that some apps are very slapdash in their support for them and what the OS provides isn't very refined. E.g. a mouse is treated more like a virtual finger than a mouse which means the pointer doesn't change shape over links, doesn't select text like a mouse, doesn't have context menus etc.
Keyboard support is better and a number of devices with hardware keyboards attest to that. I suspect keyboard is adequate for phones with keyboards although I know from ex

RIM are always running promotions and draws. I got my Playbook for nothing. I expect if a dev wanted to they could acquire a tablet. Another way to look at it is it doesn't cost anything to list apps on the Blackberry store so a one time cost for a $180 tablet isn't a huge investment, certainly not for some of the larger app development teams. Cost of the hardware is probably the least concern anyway, the cost of porting, testing and supporting an app once it's released on that platform would be considerabl

iPhones can be locked down and controlled to some degree. Enough for some corporations to allow confidential email and contact info on personal iPhones. What I'd like to see on the iPhone is a completely separate "work" sandbox. Doesn't BB offer this already?

Don't forget that Android devices are ridiculously easy to lock down and set up with full encryption. There are actually companies out there whose entire business is doing just that for the corporate use scenario.

Its so stupidly easy to integrate Android with all of their existing email and even internal messaging apps(most of which are written in Java and trivially ported to native) that it beggars belief that they would consider much of anything else.

iPhone doesn't allow the kind of direct control that Corporate security demands, and WP7 has such a low penetration that no one is asking for it anyways. Android, even though there could definitely be better solutions, is currently the only real choice for corporate america. The worker drones get something that does everything an iPhone does(in some cases does it better, in some cases worse, but the important things are roughly the same, except for the GPS nav on android is much better) and they get their security.

The iPhone Configurator allows corporations to manage iPhones. But even with that, the iPhone's data-at-rest encryption and Activesync compliance hisorically gave them a heads-up over other BYODs. In addition, third party apps for iOS / Android have provided more granular and non-managed security features. For Android it filled in encryption feature gaps which is no longer an issue on the latest devices. On the iPhone the biggest benefit of these apps was to sandbox corporate data from personal, including a remote wipe.

Don't forget that Android devices are ridiculously easy to lock down and set up with full encryption....

is currently the only real choice for corporate america.

Correct me if I am wrong, but you need to get a third party product to manage that centrally (would be interested to hear how youre doing it if not). Blackberries are STILL a good choice for corp america, if you really care about security.

You really cant compare Android's email security to BES's; Android can be tricked into disclosing email with ANY legit-signed SSL cert with the proper FQDN-- even if it was issued by the DOD or one of China's authorities. You CANNOT fool BES devices in the same way-- you must either crack the AES encryption on a per-device basis, or grab all the per-device keys from the server.

I get the whole "Oh noes BES is dying" thing, but they still have superior management, and they still have superior security. Perhaps thats not what is in vogue, and failing to adapt will kill BES, but lets not go overboard by comparing Android security to Blackberry.

They do, but the only ones that actually need that level of security generally only need it at either the highest echelons or is someone like the DoD. Sure RIM can survive on those customers but its margins are going to have to go way up and its going to have to restructure its whole business model to target ONLY the enterprise.

I was also saying this based on RIM going kaput. BES is very obviously the best choice at the moment, but in a world without BES Android becomes your only real remaining option.

I fail to see any significant difference between IOS and Android from an IT perspective. Both support activesync, both support encryption, both support SSL, and both can be centrally managed to a degree (doesnt IOS have security profiles that can be deployed?)

Theyre also inferior to BES, but if BES goes kaput I dont see why Android becomes the only option.

Because of the reasons companies are not mass deploying iOS already. Apple won't let them at the nuts and bolts to do their own security audits and never will unless they change course drastically.

Android on the other hand is very easy to audit. At present its not the best, but Apple won't let you at the nuts and bolts enough to essentially replicate what BES is now like they would be able to on Android.

RIM gets around this by allowing companies to have their own IT staff participate in penetration testing

The other side of the coin is that you *have* to customize your Android install because what you get out of the box is so laughably bad. The email and calendar clients are mediocre. And Android itself doesn't even support caldav or carddav, which completely blows my mind.
And heaven forbid you need to keep a lot of apps or a few large apps, because the system partition on most phones is so small that even if you move your apps to SD card (which doesn't actually move the entire app) , it's still all too e

Riiight, all corporate cares about is source code, because they got that with their BB phones and Windows desktops...oh wait. Nobody cares dude, nobody but the programmers that view having source as a mantra give a rat's ass, all they care about is "does it do the jobs I have" and Android answers that with a big YES by having the same Exchange support as the other guys but having better encryption that can be centrally managed.

Because if you think fortune 500 companies are paying coders to sit on ass all

For most IT departments, the security needs aren't sufficient to warrant a source code audit.Precious few though, do require source code audits, and do run their own firmware. Doing so is a lot easier if you actually can do so.

Only the recent crop of premium Android devices support these features. I have a shiny new 2.x Android device which only supports application-level encryption through third-party apps. I'm pretty new to Android, but it's important not to mislead people on this.

The same is true of iOS. You need the new stuff to have these features. I would argue that features like remote wipe, manditory encryption and whitelisting apps is much easier in iOS 5 than on Android, although I haven't looked at iOS 6 yet though.

RIM's main problem is that enterprise companies have started moving away from the platform. People don't want to carry around several smart phones and are much more eager to choose either iPhone or WP7 phones. Microsoft is known for being the office centric company and therefore has fantastic support for Exchange server and office apps. RIM lost the audience it had when Windows Phones were introduced (while Windows Mobile also had many work users, WP was a major improvement)..

While you present an interesting theory, reality is that noone is using Windows Phone [bgr.com]. They had a market share of 3% of smartphones shipped. iPhone in particular [networkworld.com] and Android are the ones eating Blackberry's lunch. To make this even worse, this quarter Windows Phone is currently only sold on known obsolete phones [arstechnica.com]. I'm glad I didn't get suckered into buying a phone that obsolete immediately, unlike Nexus Phones and iPhones.

Hell its worse than that, as we saw here a few months ago MSFT is paying $500+ in ads for every single user they get to pay $50 to take a Lumia on contract, so not only does John Average not want the phone but they took a bath on the few they lured. And of course thanks to the morons announcing no win 8 update for current phones they made the entire line worthless overnight, they can advertise until hell freezes over but who wants to be locked into a 2 year contract on a phone that has already been labeled

Hell its worse than that, as we saw here a few months ago MSFT is paying $500+ in ads for every single user they get to pay $50 to take a Lumia on contract

Not defending what might still be a waste of money by MS, but comparing the supposed "$500+" cost of the ads to the $50 "cost" of the phone doesn't really say much since that $50 is the subsidised cost and can't meaningfully be considered in isolation from the obligatory contract.

I think Windows Phone will stand a better chance when Windows RT and 8 release.

While Android is an excellent OS, it really sucks in some ways too. In particular it sucks with mouse and keyboard support. The experience of my Asus TF300 wouldn't hold a candle against a $200 netbook. Stuff like tabbing and cursor navigation / selection is horribly inconsistent and sometimes even missing from some apps (e.g. Polaris Office). I can easily imagine that Windows 8/RT is going to take off in offices because it won

Your troll was too subtle, to be funny."RIM's main problem is that enterprise companies have started moving away from the platform." While obvious, usually on par with the average Slashdot informative moderation.

"People don't want to carry around several smart phones and are much more eager to choose either iPhone or WP7 phones." This statement begins as true (insightful moderation) and if you changed WP7 or added Android. It would complete it. Your troll is based on skipping Android phones which are actua

Well hello there, Mr. Ballmer! Glad to meet your acquaintence. That was the most blatant shill I've seen in a long time, the shills are really getting thick lately. How fucking stupid do you think we nerds are, anyway?

iPhone and Win7 when Win7's market share is tiny and Android has three times the sales as iPhones, and you omit Android? Again, Redmond, why do you think we're so damned stupid? Thank you for reminding me how evil MS is and to avoid their poorly designed, user-unfriendly software and OSes.

Lets see...an account just made and the ONLY post they have is a FP plugging a product...sigh this is just sad.

For those that scream "You must be teh shill!" because i find faults in the product you love? See THIS FP by "androidlover" which to their credit they tried choosing a UID that would make them sound like they were NOT shilling...only they forgot to even name android, even though its one of the fastest growing market segments and as we saw here recently MSFT pays $500 to get people to sign a $50 con

I think it's safe to say he's a troll. The combination of the user name "AndroidLover" with the actual post pretending that Android doesn't exist and that WP7, of all things, is a major force in the market is... implausible.

He may or may not be a troll, but I work for a HUGE company, and they dumped all the Crack-Berrys and went all-in on windows phones. I was not surprised that they did that, as we are microsoft to the core (with all the benefits that entails, like blue screens galore). Before the giant black-berry purge, I had not actually seen a windows phone in the wild.

Apparently our IT folks examined the smart-phone landscape and something (hopefully) smart pushed them to WP7. so the GP may have a point.

He may or may not be a troll, but I work for a HUGE company, and they dumped all the Crack-Berrys and went all-in on windows phones. I was not surprised that they did that, as we are microsoft to the core

The problem is that Windows Phones actually aren't any better at integrating with real Windows infrastructure than iPhones, Android devices, or BlackBerries are. If Microsoft had added real domain/GPO features to Windows Phones, they could have made a good business case. But as things are, everyone has Ac

Blue screens? Seriously? WTF are you running, some 7 year old plus XP installs? Its called let go of the fricking decade old patched all to hell creaky as fuck ancient history and get Windows 7 already! I have YET to see a Win 7 BSOD, I'm sure that they can happen, but its so rare that if I ever did see one I'd be checking for hardware failures, and I work on Windows machines 6 days a week. Hell even Vista for all its pains in the ass was extremely hard to BSOD unless you ran some alpha quality graphics driver and now even that doesn't crash Win 7, it simply restarts the graphics driver, doesn't even make you close any programs.

As for WP7? Unless the PHBs that do the buying were getting nice lunches with a MS marketer i don't see the selling point. The WP phones that are out don't have either the nicer displays of iPhone nor the nicer features of the Droid phones, has less apps than both of those, and from what I've been reading doesn't even have steller AD and group management which you think if nothing else MSFT would have gotten right, seeing how WinServer is their product and all.

Of course WinPhone suffers from the same myopic focus that MSFT has had of late, their insane consumer only focus that has them pushing brain dead ideas like Metro on Win 8 Pro, like business users want their workers with a tweeting, twitting, FB shitting social page for a start screen. Yep that will get them working, have constant FB updates and other crap distracting them...sigh. Ballmer makes the Pepsi guy's rein at Apple look like the work of a fricking genius. And if the past is any indication I hope they'll be ready to toss those phones when the next WinPhone version comes out because it probably won't get an update.

Apparently they dont like a 30 minute server setup process, followed by no-hassle user adds (user needs to enter their email and the activation password) and device wipes.

Yes, Im sure something smart pushed them to WP7, but darned if I can figure out what it is. Oh wait, Im gonna go with "someone higher up doesnt care about email as much as he cares about 'slick' and 'can watch netflix'".

Why would you think the IT people had any real input into this decision?

Last time Microsoft made an aggressive push to counter Apple et. al. in the workplace, they didn't target us lowly peons - they wined and dined presidents and CEOs. I recall several Microsoft-centric directives, a few years ago, coming from the office of our university's president regarding things like setting up a campus-wide Exchange service; they came roughly six months after our central IT department announced we were moving campus mail to Google Apps.

RIM was hardly dead 5 years ago. Android wasn't out 5 years ago, it didn't come out until 2008. 5 years ago the iPhone was just coming out and it was hardly a business ready device. Do you remember the state of Palm phones and Windows Phone 5 years ago? I doubt it.

I really enjoyed my BlackBerry 5 years ago, it was an impressive device. Heck I enjoyed my BlackBerry 10 years ago. RIM was on top of the world. Shame its basically the same thing they sell today. Arrogance, ignorance, whatever their failing was. They're done today. Had they done something good 2 years ago, maybe a different story, but 2 years is a long time in this market.

From where I sit I saw one of the strengths of RIM turn against them - the BES server and all the administrative control it allows.

For many years I worked closely with the team that ran the blackberry infrastructure at my company. Whenever a new blackberry came out, users started asking for it. When I asked them about it, the answer could often be summarized as follows:

"Yes people want them, but that model has X. Our current version of X does not allow us to administratively disable X. On (date) we will

Seven years ago was 2005. According to Wikipedia, RIM turned its first profit in 2004. So you appear to be saying that you declared Blackberry dead just when it started taking off. That is certainly possible, but it doesn't mean you are prescient, it means you are an idiot. In addition you comment that you thought their infrastructure was "cool for the beginning of the 90's", considering that the first device using RIM technology shipped in 1998, that means you thought their technology was obsolete when it first shipped. I could go on, but your comment suggests that you know nothing about the history of RIM

True they don't change so quickly. The problem for RIM is that they ARE changing right now, and that change is against Blackberry. They won't be so quick to change back even if RIM does get their act together.

True they don't change so quickly. The problem for RIM is that they ARE changing right now, and that change is against Blackberry. They won't be so quick to change back even if RIM does get their act together.

Note, you HAD a Blackberry ONCE.

And, I moved from a big company to a small one that does not provide company leashes.

The big company still gives out crackberries, on a hierarchical graded scheme with the more expensive ones going to the higher ups - they get off on that kind of stuff and will continue to keep their vassals in structured and graded RIM land until such time as Apple comes out with 6 levels of iPhone, each subtly but visibly just a little bit better than the other one.

Some companies may well use them as social plumage (much like some 'primitive tribes have the men tying extensions on to their penis), but that's going to weigh against RIM too as their product line edges towards buggy whip. Nobody wants a floppy penis extension.

Wanting to save some money, I got a Blackberry, instead of an iPhone or Android. It was a stupid mistake. The phone's quality is sub-par (I had to send it off to be repaired after the screen snapped under the pressure of my thumb, from picking it up). The menus are complicated and convoluted; nothing is where you'd think it should be and somethings need to be adjusted from several different locations (and I'm good with menus. I work with computers all day). On top of all of that, the audio, on my phone model anyway, is terrible. It's muffled and hard to hear.
As soon as my commitment on this phone runs out, I am ditching this thing and never looking back.

If you're going to succeed in the "being a stupid shill" industry, you need to remember to plug the product you're being paid to shill. Knocking the competition is only half the job.

I can only score you "5/10 must try harder". Remember, next time, the final clause should be something along the lines of "I am ditching this thing for an iPhone, with its vastly superior build quality, wide selection of Angry Birds games and easy-to-use virtual keyboard, and never looking back."